Flash Fiction Story #3-The Man from Hong Kong

"Behold, I have a Herculean chore.
How shall I manage to compose a theme?"

E.E Cummings


The two new lovers sat on the small doorstep of their small house in the old Brooklyn neighborhood. Quietly they watched the man from Hong Kong walk down their neighborhood carrying a colossal umbrella, and as he was walking by them they heard him humming ‘...Oh Susanna, don’t you cry for me….I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee….’ .We do not know this mans name, but with a white T-shirt and a pair of light blue jeans -loose fitting and short -and a cigarette in his mouth, the girl baptized him O’Hara for reasons unknown to the boy.
We follow this O’ Hara down the street –He passes Joes pizza place, otherwise known as the place of the ‘felonious cocksucker with the intent to swallow’, he passes the two new lovers who are frightened of love, say’s hello to two old lovers, and glances at the Italian soccer players cursing at each other on the wet field. Under that colossal umbrella of his, he must have thought the day to be fine-looking, with the rain making all that brick and cement shimmer a little.
Tossing his cigarette and humming the last lyrics of his song, he decides to go up the narrow stairs of a friend’s house. We will baptize this friend Neruda. Neruda’s stomach was in charge of greeting all the guests, as it was always there first to welcome them in. Swinging his cane back and forth towards and away from his stomach, he contemplated the importance of punctuality when it came to a man’s death and was grateful when he saw O’Hara emerge out of that dim, narrow staircase on time. He invited him in, and offered him some tea, and laid before him three guns from which he could choose from. O’Hara chose the third one, and he must have thought it to be fine looking, with the sun making all that steel and wood shimmer a little. Neruda thanked him for choosing such a fine looking gun and took it amongst his plump fingers, pointed it amongst O’Hara’s eyes, and slowly pulled the trigger. Thinking of Alabama and how Susanna must have looked, and how her sugary tears must have tasted, O’Hara died with a smile.

"Alter Ipse Amicus" -A Friend is Another Self...(The Scatological Studies of My Best Mate)

On March 30th, 2010 while I was studying for my continuing education test during work hours, while I wanted to bash my own head against all of the walls that were surrounding me, I received the following message from my best mate:

4:09 pm
“I had cream of spinach and now am taking quite the mean dump”

Let the above be recorded in history, may it survive forever.

Flash Fiction Story #2-Death By Boredome

In this small room sat a man with wild grey hair and green eyes that rarely blinked and almost always stared into the blank space. When he would shut his eyes he would squeeze both of them tightly for 2-3 seconds and then they would suddenly both open as if an electrical current had just passed through them. His metal desk faced a small dusted window about the size of his head, and we must note here that this man did not particularly have a very big head. The dust on this window had been accumulating for more than 17 years. Perhaps if the window could speak it would have provided us with an explanation of why it stopped being a window and looked more and more like a piece of the grey walls surrounding it.
This man who went by the name of Thelonious Nile had won the lottery at the age of 28. Knowing that his coworkers would laugh if he did not quit his job as a clerk right there and then, and thinking that he did not have much choice in the matter, he left his job the very next day. Not having any specific dreams or aspirations, a friend or a lover to care for, Thelonious took all of his prize money and bought an office that very same day in a high rise building in the middle of Manhattan.
The office seemed to come with everything but a purpose, so Thelonious decided that until he would come up with a plan he would have to preoccupy himself with something else. Being accustomed from his previous job to order copy paper, and blue ballpoint pens on a weekly basis he picked up the phone and ordered ten boxes of copy paper along with ten boxes of blue ball point pens. When the supplies arrived, he opened the very first box of copy paper and laid a stack of fifty clean, white, blank papers on his desk. He also took a pen out of one of the boxes and sat himself down and his glance ricocheted from the paper under his palms to the window facing his desk. He closed his eyes for 2-3 seconds and suddenly opened them both as if an electrical current had passed through them. He grasped the pen even tighter and decisively wrote down the number 1 and than the number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and went on writing the numbers in ascending order till the fifty clean white and blank papers were no longer clean, white and blank. It was well past 5 o’clock when he had finished but he thought that since he was self employed, and he was the boss of this office as well as the owner of it, the long hours of work did not really bother him.
17 years later they found Thelonious Niles lifeless body in the chair in an office of a high rise building in Manhattan. The office just had boxes and boxes of papers with numbers written on them. In front of him was also a piece of paper with the number 315,619,200 followed by 315,619,201 315,619,202 with the last number written on that page being 315,619,238. His green eyes were wide open facing something that must have been a window at one time.

The Sound of Chewing

The Achilles heel of my mother’s side of the family…it’s kryptonite, the one chink in it’s armor, is nothing else but the sound of chewing. Go and sit next to my aunt and bite into an apple and you will see a very terrifying and alarming transformation. Her eyebrows will suddenly rise, her eyes will widen and they will look as if they are ready to pop out of her eye sockets, her mouth will clench, and all this to such an extent, that you will consider it to be one of the most nerve racking spectacles that you have ever had to witness. It used to be a mystery to me, when people suddenly would stop attending our Christmas or Thanksgiving dinners, and up until a couple years ago I thought that they must have not liked our food or the way we had set it up. It never entered my mind that we could have possibly stopped inviting them over because they had made the mistake of chewing sunflowers seeds while my aunt was 3 feet away.
My mother is a different story, she will simply get up as if insulted and walk away from anyone that accidentally slurps the soup, or will smack their lips as a sign of some kind of satisfaction regarding the food they were served. This apparently will cause an even greater confusion to our guest, when in the middle of a conversation my mother will leave them hanging as if they were a complete stranger.
So, as I grew older, I began to see early signs of this mental instability developing in me as well. For example there will be times when Shoshanna will be chewing on her bubble gum and I will turn to her and say “You have to spit that out now” at which point the gum will literally come flying out of her mouth and into the garbage can that stands next to her. Other times I will be sitting next to Dita, and I will be the one chewing on potato chips, and I will suddenly turn to ask her in a very urgent manner “Can you hear that, can you hear me chewing on the potato chips?” Of course now I try to battle this horrific ailment as best as I can. Lately for example, when I hear someone chewing on a gum, I talk to my self and try to convince my self that everything is alright, that the sound of someone smacking their gum is a good thing, someone is enjoying themselves, so I should be happy for them, that the world is a great place because of bubble gums, and sunflower seeds, and green and red apples and delicious soups, and that it would really be a sad world if it was completely devoid of the sounds that all these delicious things make. This lasts for a minute or two at which point in time I will most probably get up from my seat and distance my self as far as possible from that person and their bubble gum.

The Way the Cookie Crumbled

You know that kind of week where by the end of it you look into the mirror and realize you have a whole new stack of white hair added on you as an extra bonus? Well yes, it was a week like that.
After our building caught on fire on Sunday, after setting up an entire office within 2 days, 16 hour work shifts, setting up the new office in a construction site, booking invoices while sitting on a box with construction workers installing wires above my head, sticking my head into a garbage can so I can throw up in it on St. Patty’s day, tripping on wires and falling on my face several times, finding out that while we were moving stuff out from the old building we might have also been inhaling asbestos, having several anxiety attacks in the ladies bathroom trying to keep my self from breaking into tears in front of all my coworkers, witnessing the hysterical fits of Shosanna concerning her uterus and the dangers of inhaling asbestos, well after a week like that…my aunt finds my hidden pack of cigarettes. You might think that the universe, while it’s arranging and coordinating this fiasco of a life that I have this week would have spared me that. No in fact it didn’t. Because if it had, I would not have woken up to my aunt standing by my bed, having to listen to her deliver a 30 minute lecture on the dangers of smoking and addiction

We'd like some cables please...

Absolutely simple request. Never mind that Shosanna and I are on the 3 floor of a J& R facing a wall of 50 different kinds of cables. It’s like going to CVS and asking for medicine…no we don’t know exactly what kind of medicine, just hand us some kind of medicine, any kind will do. The man… this poor salesman. If I would have walked up to him and smashed a drum on each side of his head he would have looked less flabbergasted. You know how I know this? By the first question he asked us. He didn’t ask “What kind of cables?” for example. No. The man hit us with the most appropriate question imaginable. The man asked “Who sent you here?” as in “Who wants to fuck my life to such an extent that he would send both of you over here… at the same time… to shop together for hardware?” . Then as I look over to Shosanna she has an air about her, an air of pride and confidence, because lo and behold she informs the salesman that she is in possession of a piece of paper that contains all the necessary information that will make his life easier. A shopping list, the girl had a shopping list which apparently got swallowed by the black hole disguised as the bag she held in her hands. So after desperately looking for a piece of paper for about 20 minutes we failed to find it but came up with another brilliant idea. We can use our memory. Yes, just our memory will be enough. Our mouths started forming words like ethernet, strips, cords, words unfamiliar two us, making us look more and more retarded as the seconds would go by. This was failing. In fact for the next two hours, two hours of my life spent in J&R mind you, everything was failing. Even when we asked him to kind of wing it, just wing it, that failed too, the man simply refused to do that.I was thinking to myself how many other things I would rather do. I would rather sell my body in exchange for a dollar value McDonalds meal for example, maybe even swallow razors or torch my self while watching repeats of Little House on the Prairie.The man…this poor salesman. I knelt down on the floor for the first time in my life, I knelt down on a J&R floor and I saw tears come out of my eyes, tears caused by an uncontrollable laughter. What was going on here? What was happening? Who in their right mind would send us here? How much crack do my bosses take and how often? All these questions were racing through my brain in an uncontrollable speed. And that was it.

21st Century Telegram

Today, since it is Sunday, I did something especially moronic. I left my cell phone turned off till 4pm, at which point in time, my brain finally warmed up, and it’s stone age wheels started turning, and I figured that since I do actually have a phone, I should turn it on and see what the Lord and his marvelously sick sense of humor had in store for me on this magnificent Sunday afternoon in the greatest of all Islands. So as I turned it on, I stared at it for a few moments and heard the hypnotizing sound of a message alert. And there it was, in all its glory…“Office building was on fire, come early tomorrow.”
I don’t know how many people have ever received a message the likes of this one, and I really don’t know how a normal, logical person would react to a message like this, as I have enough clarity of mind to admit to being highly illogical, and definitely abnormal. After breaking into a cold sweat, I started dialing my friends number, and after letting it ring a dozen times with no answer, my brain, right there and then, collapsed. You see, I remembered the heater that is under my desk, and I remembered how I never remember to shut this heater off. In addition to this, I also pictured the piles of papers on my desk and under my desk, and my brain kept on playing this one image, over and over again: One of my papers being too close to the heater, and it slowly catching fire, and the fire spreading quickly, and the whole office being destroyed by the fire, and all my coworkers and my boss standing outside, looking at the entire building, their entire life and work, slowly and painfully go up and smoke. The torment of what my brain was doing to me this Sunday afternoon did not stop there though. No, after imagining all this, I pictured my boss and my coworkers looking around them, and realizing that I was missing from this horrific spectacle, and I pictured them remembering me, and my heater, and my supreme idiocy, and after piecing it all together, I imagined my boss turning to all my coworkers, with the ashes of all their work falling like little snow flakes on them, and saying “Where is Norma?”
When I finally received a phone call from my friend, I was leaning on one of the walls of my house, with both my hands clutching my head in desperation. My friend explained that not only was our office fine, but that the fire began in the basement of our building and the only thing that it had affected was the power in it. And that was it. For some reason my brain right there and then made a quick turn, and suddenly I thought of all the people that would receive various telegrams back in the 1800's, and the utter confusion, and the incredible anxiety they must have felt when they would read " Uncle Ed is shot. Come right away" or "Our cattle has disappeared. Where are you?" or " I am angry. We will talk later." And so on and so on.

My Unbearable Burden of Futile Ideas

This is a short revision or small note to the below blog post. It might be fun and interesting to express business ideas or opinions but I have come to appreciate dialogue and conversation regarding any business opinions or business ideas. It is important not be reckless about money. It gives a chance for clarification and lessens the chance of misunderstanding. It also acknowledges the fact that I am not a genius and most probably you are not one either. We can not account for everything. As a just in case, any idea or opinion going forward (from 12/16/17)  will not be considered as a blessing (in case anyone misunderstood the self sarcastic comment in the below post). Be aware of any business opinion/idea/criticism, (going forward from 12/16/17) like the disposable motel sheets below :)  that isn't accompanied by a disclaimer by me. It is just an effort towards more reason and progress for anything expressed in the future and just being aware that the internet and technology of things can create a lot of misunderstandings. Anything up until now (12/16/17) was and is free to use of course. The past is the past.

I have always had a hard time stopping my brain coming up with ideas that are entirely futile and ineffectual to me, and to the whole world for that matter. This has been going on ever since I can remember, and aside from it being mildly entertaining,it is,as a matter of fact, an unbearable burden. I suppose one could easily argue that a disorder involving a relentless rush of useless ideas does not really disrupt a life that is many ways useless, but imagine a day in my life where as I sit at my desk during work, the idea of creating a multi-flavored packed dental floss suddenly pops up, and not only does it pop up but it stays there lingering, for about an hour or two, until my brain can complete the task of thinking through all the logistics of creating this multi-flavored packed dental floss.This involves interrupting the otherwise exciting and fulfilling task of creating a needed excel spreadsheet for one of our many customers, and begin googling pattens of dental floss, manufacturers of dental floss, distributors of dental floss, and finally marketing agencies that would make my dental floss famous. But the tragedy of the situation lies in the fact that after my brain has spent hours thinking and laboring for this brilliantly useless idea, it will suddenly stop there and disappear as suddenly as it appeared. Apparently God has given me this ingenious talent but has forsaken the need for things such as, I don't know, I think the word motivation pops up in my head. So there might be people out there sitting at their desks trying desperately to get in touch with their entrepreneurial spirit or dreaming of a self starting career that will involve millions of dollars or utter and complete failure and bankruptcy. So this is for these hypothetical masses of people that can’t seem to come up with idiotic, reckless ideas of their own. I’ll just post one more now and bless you with the others later.

A) Disposable Soft Sheets for Motel Beds .
I don’t know how many people are out there that still go to seedy motels to have sex in but imagine this: Your walking into a motel that most probably reeks of leftover bodily fluids from people that you would most probably would only run into at a 7/11, in the middle of a trucker stop, somewhere in a God forsaken town in the the middle of nowhere. You go to check in and suddenly your male or female mate taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hey look, it’s a disposable soft cover sheet for the beautiful motel bed and it only costs 4 dollars! I don’t know, you think we should get it and save ourselves from rolling on sheets that could possibly give me crabs, you think we could do that?"

'Au Revoir,Shosanna!'

My friend M.M, aka Shosanna: The only Jewish girl that would let me quote a movie character that hunted Jews for a living, over and over again, during a boring Monday morning at work. Sitting next to each other every day, we sometimes begin our mornings by talking about our plans of breaking free from Corporate America, although we could also easily have an intellectual conversation about Josh Brolin, his body, and his talent for licking armpits without grossing women out in movies like “Flirting with Disaster.” Aside from this we sometimes find time to work. This has been an achievement that took an incredible amount of time and effort on our side. For us, work usually arrives after I suddenly remember that we actually work in an office, after which I will proceed to have a meltdown about some deadline or the other, then go in the backroom and yell about our complete lack of work ethics. Shosanna will then proceed to calm me down, then calm herself down, and then as a final stroke of genius she will look at me dead in the eye, and with complete confidence she will utter the following words: ‘Norma, I want you to know that I have everything under control.’ Today is one of those days for example. I will now post this blog entry, will politely ask Shosanna to read it- because aside from her there are only two other people in this world that actually follow this blog- and I will proceed to have a nervous breakdown about one of the many deadlines that have been pushed aside by some of our higher callings in life, such as talking, writing, and daydreaming.

Jean-Claude and his mighty Starburst weapon

What to do in Staten Island in the late hours of a weekday aside from watching The Butcher? Follow the adventures of Jean Claude Van Damme’s mighty weapon that helped him fight the bad guys in Cyborg. I mean really just follow the weapon though, because whoever designed this futuristic bicycle pump is one hell of a guy and I pay my respects to him. There is no sarcasm in what I just said. It takes a lot of guts to put a contraption like that together and try to convince an audience that it can shoot out something other than orange flavored Starburst's. In fact it is the only weapon that made me crave orange flavored Starburst's, ever.

Utopia

I don’t know why when I call various vendors at my job to ask for information pertaining to some given problem of the day, I imagine that on the other side of the phone line there is a person working in a perfect corporation, and he or she is sitting at a perfectly square desk, tailored specifically to their size and designed to fit paperwork that involves only my company and my problems. In addition to this I go even further in imagining this employee’s background and reason for his or her existence. I imagine that when they were being interviewed for their current job the manager asked questions only on how to deal effectively with me and my company, and the standards were strict, very strict. I also imagine that these imaginary employees that sit on their desk from 9-5 waiting for my one phone call also do not eat. For some reason I can’t imagine them chewing on something or spilling it all over their shirt, they are far to ideal for that kind of thing. You could also forget about them going to a bathroom of any kind other too maybe wash their already perfectly clean hands. But is that what our customers imagine when they call me on the phone and yell and huff and puff waiting for an answer to a question that goes back to 1998? Do they not know that for me to actually reach my keyboard I have to go through numerous obstacles, such as a pile of papers that’s been accumulating for over 5 months or 3 half full cups of coffees that have been sitting on my desk for 2 weeks now? That my phone wire is so tangled up that when I actually pick up the receiver the whole device lifts up in the air. That I accidentally, most probably will knock down my hard drive because my feet couldn’t tell the difference from that and my 12 pair of shoes that are under my 3 foot desk. Also that when I do actually reach my keyboard my computer freezes up because it has about a dozen chat windows open and about 2 dozen other arbitrary windows where I have googled anything from recipes that date back to 1778, pornstars, horticulture and brain tumor symptoms cause I’m a full blown hypochondriac to top it all off…..What the hell do they imagine I am, a nice little girl sitting at a perfect little desk waiting for their one phone call all day? Do they really imagine that that is the reason of my damned existence?

Flash Fiction Story #1 -The Gigantic Orange

It's been three days now that my brain has been vacationing at work. As far as I'm concerened my brain is now wearing a gigantic sun hat and sunglasses and sipping a beer somewhere in an undiscovered island in the tropics-yes my brain is in a Corona commercial. All I can hear is my bizzare thoughts and the Hound talking to me through IM at various points throughout the day. But today when the Hound signed on, I sent him two short stories I had written and they depressed him, to such an extent, that he felt the need to point it out over and over again-something that made me feel that I needed a new challenge for a story, a challenge that came straight from the Hound. So he informed me that during work I would have to write a story that would include the following 5 words. Cervix, orange, squirt,crash and sleep.Also it had to involve something sexual and have a happy ending. This was the result:

The Gigantic Orange

Lou Anne Boozy had the most bizarre dreams of all her family members. Now this would be alright for Lou Anne’s father and mother, brothers and sisters and cousins and aunt and uncle-all of which lived in the same house- if she wasn’t in the habit of talking and walking in her sleep as well, something that could be a very disturbing experience, especially if you were just a visitor at their home. So it happened one night that the priest of their small town had to stay overnight at their home. You see, under normal circumstances the priest would stay in the small room on the upper level of the church, but during an incredible thunderstorm in the middle of a winter night, a lighting bolt had struck the church and all the power went out, along with the power of the only small heater in the priest’s room. Father McFaline was a tough man under any other circumstances, but his one weak spot was the cold. He had very poor circulation and his toes froze to such an extent that the doctor warned that they could fall off on a very cold night. So as Father McFaline lit the one candle that was by his bedside, he placed it between his two feet on the cold hardwood floor and sat for a couple of minutes contemplating of what he would do now that there was no heat and his toes could fall off. As he stared at the space between his toes for some time, he came up with the solution to go to the Boozy’s home that was just a couple hundred feet away from the church. This was a matter of his toes well being, and the fact that he would possibly jeopardize his exceptional reputation was something that he was willing to risk. You see Father McFaline had a secret as well, as a matter of fact the whole town was full of secrets, but today we can only speak of two of the towns people’s secrets. At night he would often dream that as he was ready to give his sermon, he would look down in the audience and all that would be there was a gigantic orange , sitting comfortable, with its arms folded one into the other and tapping its one foot at a steady beat, waiting to hear the Fathers sermon. But in his dreams the priest would become so nervous in front of the orange that he would fail to give his sermon, something that would make the orange so angry that it would jump out of its chair and start rolling towards Father McFalines direction. This repetitive dream would often result in the priest sleep walking or sleep running for lack of a better word. Still in his sleep, he would jump out of his bed , running and screaming like a lunatic in the middle of the night, in the middle of an empty church. Sometimes the town’s policeman would be heading home after his late shift and he would see the priest running inside the church, with his arms raised high up in the air, sometimes crashing into various walls. He would not think anything of it though, he was an old and tired policeman that cared more about the whiskey that was waiting for him back in his house, than a lunatic priest running around a church in the middle of the night. With all that, the priest got up and put on some warm clothes and headed towards the Boozy’s home praying along the way that the orange he would dream of almost every night wouldn’t visit him during his stay there.
As he knocked on their door in the middle of the night, the Boozys welcomed the soaking wet priest into their house. Whispering some small talk amongst each other they took him up the stairs and showed him to the small empty room right next to Lou Anne’s room. The priest got out of his clothes and went straight under the covers, and thanked God for his toes staying put, and for the warmth and hospitality that existed in this house. He had a feeling that he would not dream of any oranges chasing him that night, and so slipped quickly into a deep and comfortable sleep.
That night Lou Anne was having one of her vivid dreams, and sleepwalking she got up from her bed and went straight to the room and the bed the priest was sleeping in, got into it, and while she was humming she gently played around with the priest’s testicles. The priest though was having a dream of his own, and never woke up despite the humming and having his testicles played around with. He dreamt of the orange again, but this time as he was looking towards the audience, he saw a beautiful woman sitting behind the gigantic orange. Annoyed at the impatience of the orange, the priest saw the woman get up and wrap her hands around this orange and the orange became smaller and smaller and smaller till it became but the size of a small ball that she could hold in the palm of her right hand. He saw the woman smile at the priest and all his nervousness disappeared, and while he was delivering his sermon the woman opened her two legs and slowly pushed the orange inside her till it reached deep inside the cervix, and all that was left of the terrible gigantic orange was a little squirt that came out of the hole that was between the beautiful woman’s legs.
So the next morning one could say that Father McFaline woke up a different man. He did not know that Lou Anne had been in his bed that night and probably would not care if one went by the way he felt that morning. Smiling he went down to the kitchen where the entire Boozy family was eating breakfast and he announced that not only was he leaving the priesthood behind, but he also bent down on one knee, and as Lou Anne was biting into a juicy orange he asked her hand in marriage.